


The Rust-Girl and the Captain

by The_Shame_Basement



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Game, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fluff, Knife-Sharpening, Ship Captain Eridan, Slavery, Vaginal Sex, aradia sharpens eridan's blade (not a metaphor)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 15:30:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19833121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Shame_Basement/pseuds/The_Shame_Basement
Summary: A little ficlet about a girl who goes on an adventure! Things don't turn out quite how she expected, but everything ends up pretty okay as far as she's concerned.





	The Rust-Girl and the Captain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avis_icarus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avis_icarus/gifts).



It’s hardly her fault. 

She’d longed for _adventure,_ like in her books and movies, and once she realized the ruins near her hive weren’t more than a couple dozen sweeps old, she came to understand that _adventure_ was something found far beyond a rust-suburb’s grassy fields. So, being an intrepid sort, she took herself to the city– and being a rural girl with little money to her name, she found the city not so forgiving as the plains. It wasn’t long before she went to sleep behind a bench and woke up half-drugged and hogtied. 

She was sold at market that day to an unseen stranger, and loaded– with her head shaved and claws clipped– onto a grand old sailing ship, just like the rest of its cargo. 

Perigees pass. She’d expected to do labor, but they give her small tasks: peeling potatoes; feeding the ship’s goat; sharpening knives. The last of these is her favorite, because the knives are old and beautiful and peppered with scratches and nicks that speak to a long history of use. She works harder at the prettier ones. It’s not until several nights later that she realizes the gem-set dagger she’d honed was the captain’s– and she doesn’t find this out in the ordinary way, but rather through waking up to a cloth parcel in front of her bunk and a note pinned on top, reading IMPRESS ME. 

The parcel’s full of blades– some plain, some ornate; some shiny, some so rusted she’s not sure there’s much to sharpen at all. All of them are clearly quite old.

She rolls up her sleeves and gets a cup of freshwater for her whetstones, and spends hours working over every knife and dagger, taking more care than ever to preserve the character of the ancient metal. Her fingers are black with fine-ground swarf when she’s finished. 

The captain invites her to eat with him in his quarters that day. It’s the first time he’s spoken to her without giving her an order; he’s intense, stern and reserved (although he can’t be much older than she is), with piercing eyes that track movement like a predator’s. His scarred hands grip the handles of his flatware with a certain delicacy. 

It’s very awkward at first. He speaks like he’s not used to company; Aradia’s not entirely used to it either. But with time, they fall in step; they spend hours talking about the blades Aradia honed, which leads them to discussions of history and travel and adventure, and when they find their plates are empty, the captain– Eridan, he’s introduced himself as– brings out a bottle of wine and a box of dark chocolates, and by the time they’ve made their way through those, they’re sitting nestled up together on a padded, blanket-strewn bench which Aradia realizes, suddenly and unexpectedly, was almost certainly built to be a pailing platform. 

She murmurs something about needing to get to coon, there’s a busy night ahead of her tomorrow. 

He stares at her with big, shiny sea-folk’s eyes, with his arm around her shoulder and her legs in his lap, and says _please stay with me_ , and she can’t find a single reason to say no.

And so she takes his hand in hers and presses a brave kiss to the scar across his knuckle, tasting salt that doesn’t fade when he ducks awkwardly in to press his own lips to hers. His hand comes to rest at the base of her skull, below where her cropped slave’s hair has grown out into short curls.

They make love like a sword being forged. The slow, aching pull of his hands across her, under her simple clothes, across her warm skin flushed from the wine; the cool tongue at the base of her throat, under the curve of her breast, against the tendon standing out at the innermost part of her thigh. When he takes her hips in two big, strong hands and angles in to lick shyly at the softest parts of her– each stroke of tongue a backbeat to the hammer-pounding of her heart– she feels like she’s burning alive. 

He gives her– slave-girl that she is, rust and poor and much too bold for her station– everything he can. He gives her the run of his mouth and hands and twining cock and the whole of his strong body; he fucks her deep and long when she asks him to. He holds her close and thumbs at swollen-hot skin until she shudders to completion again, in a crash of movement and noise like molten metal being plunged into water. 

Neither of them dare to speak when it’s over, and it’s much easier to pretend to be asleep than to find the words to discuss what any of this means. 

In their sleep, though, they hold each other, and the crew’s good enough to hold off gossiping at Aradia’s empty bunk. When moonrise rolls around, two trays of breakfast are placed quietly outside Eridan’s door.


End file.
